Sickness

Sickness

Weekend staff sickness getting you down? You’re not alone. Over 130 million days in UK workplaces each year are lost to staff sickness and 58 million of those are due to minor illness, coughs and colds or aches and pains.

Sickness causes much disruption in the hotel housekeeping department. Often there is no one else to cover the absence which means that the rooms that are un-allocated because of it are generally divided up between the other workers or rolled over to another day shifting the problem sideways and potentially causing capacity issues.

The result? Housekeeping staff are under pressure to complete more work in the same time. Cleanliness standards fall and guest complaints rise.

Sickness in the Housekeeping department is a downward spiral which leads to more sickness and staff turnover. Surveys have shown that as many as 84% of housekeeping staff regularly take painkillers before work due to back and shoulder pain. Placing staff under additional pressure just accelerates the next sickness bout.

Managers are then distracted from the core business of selling rooms and instead have to deal with guest complaints, temporary staffing, training and possibly capability or disciplinary issues and the resulting staff turnover.

And if that isn’t enough, a focus has to be placed on the restoration of consistent cleaning.

Happy Housekeepers

At Pura, we focus on staff welfare as part of our contract. We’re passionate about training and finding ways to make work easier and more beneficial to our team whilst delivering the required cleanliness result to the hotel. Happy housekeeping workers lead to less disruption and better consistency in cleaning, whilst outsourcing housekeeping to us allows a hotel manager to leave all of these worries behind and focus on enhancing revenue, cost control and guest service.